


...Peter got sick

by Pugrii_writes_2453



Series: What if... [2]
Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Everyone Has Issues, Fever, Fever Dreams, Hallucinations, Illnesses, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Injury, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-08-17
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:41:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,064
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25893049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pugrii_writes_2453/pseuds/Pugrii_writes_2453
Summary: Someone caught a space flu and is not dealing with it too well.
Relationships: Gamora/Peter Quill
Series: What if... [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1849735
Kudos: 24





	...Peter got sick

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for the lovely cherry to beta this for me!

The day had started out pretty well. A night without nightmares and a nice breakfast without any fighting. The next mission was about two days away so they had plenty of time to kill. 

Rocket, as always, was tinkering with his guns and explosives, Drax was taking care of his weapons, and Gamora was working out. Where Groot was, Peter wasn’t exactly sure but last time he had seen the tree he had gone into the shower. Being cooped up with four other people in such a small space was sometimes tiresome and made nerves wear thin. 

Peter knew that, so when he saw that everyone was busy and no one wanted to spend time with him, he went to put on some music. Mr. Blue sky started blasting through the stereo and Peter did a little dance by himself. It was nice how he could relate to the song. 

The past few days hadn’t been too good for the good old Starlord. Nightmares (they didn't leave him gasping for air and holding back tears, definitely not) had made sleep restless and not at all calming. The crew had been getting more and more annoyed with his antics already on the first day of their five-day trip (they had to keep a low profile, so no jumping) so he had held his head low for a while. 

So, day number three of keeping to himself.

The song continued on and Peter settled down next to the stereo to deep clean his rocket boots. After all, they too needed maintenance, which they hadn’t received in a long while. It was weird how it almost felt like that before the guardians were brought to life. That period of his life hadn't been too nice. 

The loneliness had been killing him. Every day he had risked his life, earned credits, and then was stuck with himself in the end. There was a reason he was so loud and annoying, because if he didn't talk or got all of the stuff he had to say out he would be alone with his thoughts. Most of the time, they had been nasty and not where happy and fine Peter of the present wanted to be. Now they were mostly fine. Normal, but there were some days. Those days he was stuck in a rut. 

It had only happened a few times with them, at least. 

Peter had learned with the Ravagers that stuff like that should stay silent because someone might be using it to their advantage. Yondu had been an okay dad. He had tried more and more with the years, but—Peter didn't want to think about him right now. Too soon. 

He stayed silent or in bed. The crew always teased him about having either caught a stupid terran bug or that terrans couldn’t handle the lifestyle. To them, he was just a stupid, happy-go-lucky, arrogant asshole terran. Peter was fine with that and wished that he was like that. Really, he did. He knew he had problems, but he didn't want to admit to his weakness. The team didn't need to know how weak and vulnerable he was. They had their own battles and they were all harder to fight than his. He had no right to complain. 

They all knew that humans were weaker physically than most races in the universe. Especially when he wasn't even a real human. All he was was a hybrid birthed to the best woman ever in the entire universe and a manipulative, murderous, and narcissistic bastard. Really, he was nothing. He didn't get the best of humans and he didn't want to have anything from his "father". His real father was dead and he had died for Peter. Yondu had deserved so much better.

At this point, Peter realized that he wasn't cleaning his boots anymore but was staring off somewhere ahead of him, at nothing. And here he thought today was a good day. Maybe the others had calmed a bit down and would maybe just talk to him. 

He wouldn't even ask to play cards or offer his crappy help or disturb them in general. With others having their attention only half on him it was easier to half focus on them too. So the almighty starlord got up, put his boots back on, and decided to try to talk to Gamora. 

As always, Gamora had been very calm and level-headed when she told him to just give her some fucking space, please. That had been on the first day and after a few other incidents with the rest of the crew that whole thing had started. 

On the way towards Gamora's training spot, he met Rocket sitting just a bit back from where he had sat in the cockpit. It looked like he was doing a routine check on all of his weapons and explosives, repairing what had to be repaired. It looked like Rocket was enjoying himself very much without anyone. Groot was also sitting near and was still dripping slightly onto the floor, resting. 

"Hey!" Peter greeted Rocket, careful not to make enough noise to wake up the big tree from his sleep. 

“Whaddaya want?” Rocket grumbled in return. Peter wasn't disappointed at all that the raccoon wasn't happy to talk to him or didn't even glance up at all, definitely not. To his defense, he was currently fixing some sort of timed bomb or something like that and it seemed complicated enough. 

“Just wanted to say hi and check in,” Peter explained. Rocket mumbled something about how he should fuck off and that he was busy. Groot at this point woke up, glared at him, and turned back around to nap. 

"And turn the stupid music off!"

That made Peter freeze. Rocket usually complained or moaned about the music, but he did like it. Peter knew that, the raccoon had admitted to it. The whole team knew how important it was to their captain. The last connection to his mother. They all knew loss and understood fully why he loved the tape so much. 

Why would Rocket say something like that, especially in that tone? "

I said turn it off!" Rocket yelled at him again. He sounded so cold, so angry, so full of...hate. Was it directed at him? It had to be. 

“Sure,” he managed to get out and stumbled hastily back to the stereo. With a click, he turned the machine off. This all felt weird. Rocket must be having a hard time too. Groot got up with a groan and walked off. The mechanic just scoffed and returned to his work. Peter decided to let him be. 

Someone got bit on the tail today, he thought to himself as he walked carefully past the angry raccoon and into the belly of the Benetar. Again, he didn't meet Gamora, but Groot. There the giant tree had gone, obviously retrieving his gaming console. Peter grinned at him, waved, and started to say something when Groot pushed rudely past him, actually bumping his shoulder. 

He could feel the bark scratching some of his skin off but he didn't complain. The most painful thing about what had just happened was the harsh disregard the usually warm and kind tree had shown him. Groot hadn't even looked at him at all. 

“Hey,” he said and pressed his lips together, letting his arm drop back to his side. A weird stinging feeling settled in his chest. 

Ignoring both of the other guardians, Peter continued to search for Gamora. By his luck, however, he ran first into Drax and Mantis. Peter wanted to greet them but decided against it at the last moment and just gave them a pressed half-smile. Drax continued to clean and care for his sword and only Mantis looked at him. She looked like her normal self in the first few seconds but her expression contorted into first discomfort and then pain. That Drax seemed to notice and he followed Mantis' gaze to where Peter was leaning against the wall, confusedly. 

“You are causing her pain,” the man stated. Mantis nodded. 

“You always are but I never said anything,” she admitted and looked away. Peter opened his mouth to say that he wasn't doing anything and to ask what was wrong. Drax was faster. 

"Stop it!" he said loudly Again before he could respond he was interrupted by Rocket yelling from the cockpit that Quill should stop bothering everyone. 

The sting got worse. Apparently, he was too weak to keep his mental barrier up to stop Mantis from detecting his stress, because yes he was stressed. Peter was stressed as shit about how everyone was acting weird and tense. He was hurt and felt, for the first time since the guardians were formed, alone. It was weird, really. 

Before take-off they were perfectly fine, maybe a little more tense than usual but still perfectly fine, and yet everyone seemed to be fed up with him. The hybrid knew that he was too much sometimes, that he was loud and annoying sometimes but they had never reacted that way. 

He left the room quickly. 

***

Gamora should be in the machine room training. She liked to work out there for a reason she had told Peter but he had forgotten. He poked his head into the room and was promptly hit in the face with a ball. Pain immediately bloomed on his nose and he cried out in pain. His entire face hurt. 

"Watch out, Quill!" Gamora shouted at him, "You have to be more careful! Or do you want us to always have to watch over you on the battlefield?" 

The sting spread from his lungs to his entire chest and stung more and more. The pain doubled and he couldn't help but wheeze as the pain robbed him from the ability to breathe. 

“Oh come on! I didn't hit you that hard,” she said and put her hands on her hips. She looked sweaty from the training and...disappointed? Pissed? Angry? It was hard to tell from the tears welling up in his eyes. 

Peter hadn't cried since Yondu died and now he was going to cry because his friends were fed up with him and he got hit in the face with a ball? Really? 

Peter really was a burden on the battlefield and he knew it. Peter really was disturbing them all. Peter really was causing all of them problems. Why wasn't he doing anything against it? It was his duty as captain to take care of his crew. 

"Sorry," he mumbled and quickly left the room again without the expected warmth and comfort. He could still hear Gamora saying that he should be sorry. Peter wasn't crying, no he wasn't. The sting was filling his mind and he couldn't concentrate on anything else. It hurt so much. Why did it hurt? It made no sense...

He fled to the bedroom that they all shared. There were enough beds for all of them but they usually slept in a weird heap of limbs. He didn't even have his walkman with him but he didn't want to disturb his friends any more than he had already. Instead, he sat on one of the beds and took a minute to breathe. The pain in his chest was still there. The sting pulsed in sync with the pain on his face. Something wasn't right. This wasn't how it was supposed to be. 

They were family, right? They were family and they needed some space, some space from him. There was nothing wrong with that, was there? Peter let his head sink into his hands. It hurt so bad. Why did his chest hurt so much? 

Why? Why had they sent him away? Why would they do that? Why would they ignore him like that? He never meant to hurt Mantis—any of them. He never meant to and he never wanted to. Was it his fault? He couldn't think straight anymore.

He got up and started pacing. 

Memories came flooding back to him and every single one of them made it sting worse and worse until he couldn't take it anymore. He saw Gamora rolling her eyes at another dumb joke he had pulled and saying that she was going to die surrounded by the biggest idiots in the universe. Drax reminding him of his weakness and weird Terran no one understood. Rocket telling everyone that he was the captain and not some impossible terran douchebag. All of the times that he had made Groot and Mantis sad, the times he disappointed them. They wouldn't stop, they wouldn't stop. 

The memories he tried to forget broke out of their mental prison. Yondu's death and how it was his fault, just like his mother's death. All of the times he had wished to die instead of growing up with the Ravagers. All of it clouded his mind until he couldn't see anymore. He couldn't hear anything anymore, only that cacophony of voices echoing through his mind. It only got louder and louder until he was left banging his head against the wall just to make it stop, to make it shut up. 

It never did. 

No matter how hard he pulled his hair, no matter how tightly he screwed his eyes shut, no matter how hard he banged his head against the wall or how hard he scratched at his arm, his ears, his eyes. It just never stopped. Why wouldn't it just stop? 

The pain in his chest and face wouldn't fade and seemed to consume him. The only things he could focus on were the voices screaming - not into his god damn ears but into his fucking mind - and the flashing images of all of his mistakes, failures, the ones he couldn’t save. It hurt. His eyes hurt from the assault of light and flashes and his ears just wouldn't stop ringing while his mind didn’t stop supplying him with voices, memories. This was worse than any torture he had ever had to go through. 

*Yo, Quill! Can ya - like I dunno - stop making that dasting noise?*

*What in the dasting hell are you doing?*

*Peter! Stop!*

That sounded like Rocket. Was it him? It was him. He could hear him. Many times in fact. So many times. His voice was part of the storm. 

Rocket wasn't here. He wasn't, no. Why wouldn't it stop? Why wouldn't all of it stop? He couldn't take it anymore. Nothing he did helped. The pain was unbearable at this point. Peter couldn't breathe, couldn't even think about trying to calm down or stop digging his nails into his skin and trying to make it stop somehow. There was nothing worse than watching his mom die over and over again. Her white face staring pleadingly at him while he refused her last wish. There was nothing worse than knowing full well that he was at fault for Yondu’s death and how he had never said thank you for anything he had done for him. 

It hurt like a bitch.

***

Of course, it had to be flarking Quill that got hit with it. It was some stupid flu, nothing too bad. Few days, some fever and that should be it. At least that was what the computer had said.

*Fevers - in case of severe fevers hallucinations could occur- headaches and mild to tolerable breathing problems* was what it had said. 

Their captain had asked them to just give him some space and that he would be fine. He just needed to sleep it off. Rocket, not being too sure how to care for a sick person, especially not if it was just some mild flu (rarely any complications came up with it - mind you) so it wasn't as if he needed a dasting babysitter, was the first one to leave the room. The others had reacted pretty similarly, only Drax had to be sent out twice. 

Dasting terran had been sleeping and playing with his walkman for the past three days. He got better but wasn’t fully fit yet and Gamora didn't want to have to drag his unwell ass from the battlefield back to bed. During the first night he had complained about not being part of the "sleeping pile", but he didn't mean any of it. 

Now the not raccoon was tinkering without a terran confusing him and was pretty much enjoying himself. Until a dull thumping sound came up. It was coming from the bedroom and only by coincidence Rocket was sitting near it. Irregular bangs came from inside the room and Rocket just knew that the bastard was doing *something*. 

Ten minutes into that, the mechanic had enough of it and marched over to the door. 

"Yo, Quill!", he said angrily and flung open the door. "Can ya - like I dunno - stop makin that dasting noise?" His eyes were met with the empty bed, that they had pushed to the wall to make space, but the noise continued. He stepped into the room, his anger fading to confusion and (not that he would be admitting it) worry. 

“What in the dasting hell are you doing?” he asked into the room when he approached the corner between bed and wall. Then the smell of blood reached his nose. Rushing past the bed he saw what was making the noise. 

Quill was banging his head against the wall. Now he could hear the whimpers and sobs. His eyes were blown wide and weren’t focusing on anything. Rocket was frozen in place for a second when he got a good look at his face. 

He had never seen Quill so terrified, so hurt, so...crushed. Tears were streaming down his face and his forehead was red and bruised already. Hunched over and on his knees, Peter moved from scratching his arms bloody to claw at his eyes. Rocket was flung out of his shock when a scream erupted from Peter’s lungs and he slammed his head even harder against the wall. 

"Peter!" Rocket yelled and lunged forward to put himself between the wall and Peter. Blood matted the fur on the back of his neck. Trying to hold his captain’s hands still, he could feel the heat practically radiating from his skin. 

"Help!" the guardian screamed. This cost him a second. This one second his attention wasn't entirely on Peter, the terran used to slam his head onto the floor with another scream. Now he wouldn't stop screaming. The sound made Rocket’s ears lay flat and his fur stand up. What in the actual demonic shit was wrong with him? 

The raccoon sat down on Peter's knees, pushed his head back up, and pulled their hands between them. At least, he wasn't strong enough at the moment to fight back against the smaller guardian. At this point, blood trickled down Peter's face and mixed with his tears and snot. To say Rocket was scared was an understatement. Seeing the usual singing, dancing, and happy (and annoying) captain acting as if he was going krutakin crazy and wanted to bash his goddamn skull in. 

Heavy footsteps hurried towards them, the screams of absolute terror from Peter and Rocket’s cry for help had finally alerted them. Rocket didn't dare to give anything else attention than Peter. It broke his heart a little when Quill pressed his head into Rocket's stomach now practically folded in on himself as if to get comfort from him from whatever was torturing the guy. 

The mechanic’s hands were still holding their intertwined hands to his chest to keep the maniac from drawing even more blood. Gamora stormed in first and was closely followed by Drax and Groot. 

"What's going on?" she demanded while they took in the scene. 

"Do I look like I krutakin know?!” Rocket all but screamed at her. 

“Quill seems to be in huge distress,” Drax stated, really not sure what to do with himself. Mantis just took one look into the room and ran, probably to set up the med bay. 

"OH, You don't flarking say? Help me!" the raccoon snarled again while Gamora tried to get Peter to respond to her to no avail. 

"To the medbay!" she ordered. 

***

In the end, Peter had to be sedated. He wouldn't stop screaming and trying to make something "stop". They hadn’t been able to get anything out of him. To say that everyone in the room was shaken was an understatement. 

Never before had they seen their captain like that. Screaming, crying hysterically and hyperventilating as if his lungs wanted to jump out of his body, not to mention the whole bash-his-own-skull-in-thing, that Rocket had told them even made him check on him. That was before the screaming started. Now they just sat there and waited. 

It didn't look right to see Quill lie so still there. The big bandaid on his forehead was so...white, so clean. It made him look incredibly pale. The cooling pads on both of his temples also just made him look lifeless, which Drax really didn't like. It had only been ten minutes after the screams had stopped. 

Drax couldn't get the sound out of his ears. It sounded similar to his old family's screams when they had been slaughtered. Pure terror, desperation and pain...he would never forget their screams. Now his captains were also never to be forgotten. Drax did not like it. He did not like not being able to fight the things off that hurt his friends. 

This he couldn't fight. This he couldn't fix. They would have to wait until Quill either got better or they got to the hospital. Even after that, they would have to do a lot of waiting for him to get properly back into fighting form. Whatever had made such a strong warrior like Quill react in such a way must be very gruesome. He was worried and wanted him to get better rapidly. 

"When will he get better?" he asked.

Rockets fur puffed up, so Drax could tell that he was upset. 

“Well, we still don't krutaking know!” he yelled. There was still blood on his shirt from Quill’s head wound. Gamora sighed. 

"Nothing has changed in the past ten minutes. His fever still has barely gone down and all we can do now is to hope it stays down", she explained once again. Groot and Mantis just shared a sad yet hopeful look. Cooling him down and waiting for him to wake up was once again the answer. Rocket and Gamora were smart and both knew how to operate the medical instruments, just like Mantis did (but she never spoke up about the situation after she had managed to get Quill to sleep). Mantis had said that he was really scared and hurt. 

"So full of guilt and regret...he is in great anguish…” as she had said. After that she had kept silent. The whole room was too silent. 

"Do you think he will get better?" Drax finally asked. 

The flu, he had forgotten the name of it immediately after Rocket had read it from the scanner, was known to be able to overheat the body so much that the brain stopped working properly. It worried him, immensely. 

After a few hours, they had reached the hospital. The doctors confirmed the guardians’ diagnosis and told them that if they hadn't reacted the way they did they might as well be captainless at this point. It took Peter two days until he regained consciousness. 

Confused, dissociated, and in pain he had first tried to escape but soon enough a few threats and gentle reminders that it was alright now made him calm enough to focus. About the whole "almost-smashing-his-krutaking-skull-in"- thing he hadn't wanted to talk about, but none of them really minded about waiting until he was ready, especially Rocket. 

After three more days, the guardians were allowed to leave and were on their merry way. The unspoken rule of never leaving anyone alone when they were sick came to life. Normalcy (as much as they had it) came back into their lives. It was all good. Rocket didn't have nightmares of finding Quill with his head split open and Peter didn't dream of being stuck in a storm of ugly voices screaming at him. 

It was fine.

They were fine

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I finished this just now and decided why not just post it without letting my beta do her job...what could go wrong? Hope you enjoyed and stay for more
> 
> Join my discord server if you wanna:  
> https://discord.gg/sf5jV9p


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